The new Herbarium Digitization Laboratory opened in October 2005. This 787 square foot facility contains four digitization stations and one lab manager’s workstation. The digitization stations, which are separated from one another by light-impervious, retractable screens, surround a central work counter that doubles as a conference table.
Each digitization station consists of a camera and light stand attached to a dedicated computer. The premier specimen digitization bay contains an Eyelike Precision M22 Digital camera mounted on a TTI Repro-graphic workstation, attached to a Macintosh G5 computer. This camera captures raw images in the range of 64 to 490 megabytes. Two additional specimen digitization stations have Kodak instant capture digital cameras attached to Bencher light stands attached to Pentium 4 PC computers. The size of raw images captured by these cameras is 6 megabytes. The fourth station consists of a Bookeye scanner mounted on a book cradle, which is attached to a Pentium computer. All computers in the lab are attached to the NYBG intranet; raw images captured by the Digitization Laboratory cameras are stored in the Archivas Content-Addressed-Storage system. Additional equipment includes flatbed and photographic slide scanners.
The Herbarium Digitization Laboratory, which is overseen by Digitization Manager Nestor Pérez-Molière is available for use by specimen cataloging projects, scientific research projects by staff and graduate students, library digitization projects, and undergraduate internships.